The Washington Post in The New Yorker

Only a few days ago, the big news in the world of newspapers was that the Boston Globe had been sold to John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, for seventy million dollars. Now comes word that the Washington Post has also been sold, in this case to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who paid two hundred and fifty million dollars for it. Two of the East Coast’s most prominent newspapers have been sold within days of each other. (It’s worth noting that Bezos bought the newspaper himself; it won’t be owned by Amazon. And Bezos purchased the Post, and not the Washington Post Company; he won’t be the owner of the Company’s many businesses, including Slate, Foreign Policy, and Kaplan, the test-prep company.)

Over the years, The New Yorker has published a lot of writing about the Post. “In the stream of the nation’s capital, the Washington Post is very much like a whale,” Jeffrey Frank wrote, in 1996. “Its smallest splashes rarely go unnoticed.” In honor of today’s big splash, here’s a Washington Post reading list from The New Yorker’s archive.

A profile of Donald Graham, the current C.E.O. of The Washington Post Company. “Donald Graham inherited a newspaper shaped by a brilliant newspaperman, his father, Philip Graham,” Toobin writes. “What he will pass on to the next generation of the family is a paper that adheres to the practices of a brilliant businessman, Warren Buffett.”

A look back at the life and work of Meg Greenfield, who was the editor of the Post’s op-ed page for two decades. A confidante of Katharine Graham, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her editorial writing. “Every day, on its editorial page, the Post styles itself AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER,” Hertzberg writes. “Meg Greenfield made that slogan stick.”

A wide-ranging review of “A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures,” by the iconic newspaper editor Benjamin Bradlee, who was executive editor of the Post from 1968 to 1991. Bradlee’s memoir, Remnick writes, “recounts what it took to make a bad newspaper great. Is there any chance of anyone letting something like that happen today?”

Two glimpses of Katharine Graham: the first, a breakfast given in her honor at the Rainbow Room, when she was in her late fifties; the second, an obituary written after her death, in 2001. “Of all the great newspaper proprietors of the century just past,” Hertzberg writes, “none are likely to be remembered as vividly, and certainly none as intimately, as Katharine Graham.”

The story of Stanley Kaplan, the founder of Kaplan, Inc., the test-prep company. In 1984, The Washington Post Company bought Kaplan, Inc. for forty-five million dollars; it’s been one of the Post Company’s largest sources of revenue.

All of these stories are available to subscribers in The New Yorker’s online archive, which goes all the way back to 1925.Photograph by Ken Cedeno/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes a blog about books and ideas.